Shigeru Miyamoto is special! How special? Special enough to walk home (or, more likely, take the Shinkansen home) with the "Special Award" from the first ever CEDEC Awards.

Miyamoto accepts his award at the CEDEC Awards 2008 presentation.

[end_preview /]

That's Miyamoto accepting the "Special Award" towards the end of the awards presentation today. According to event organizer CESA (this is the same group that organizes the Tokyo Game Show), Miyamoto got the award for leading the game industry from the time of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers all the way to Wii Fit, for having tremendous influence on and earning great respect from game creators throughout the world, and for grabbing players of all types.

Here's a picture of Miyamoto's shoes.

Miyamoto's shoes. They are good shoes.

With Miyamoto's Thursday morning keynote closed off from the press, I wasn't expecting to get a close-up of his footwear until next year's E3, so you can bet I'm happy he won the award!

Miyamoto was joined at the event by some big names. Fellow Nintenfriends Koji Kondo and Takashi Tezuka took awards for, respectively, sound in the Zelda series and level design in the Super Mario Bros. series (that's Tezuka's shoe to the left). Sony's Fumito Ueda (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus) was there with his team to take the award for visual arts in ICO.

Winners of the first CEDEC Awards.

Epic's Tim Sweeney was also there, handing out prizes! He gave a Gears of War calendar signed by Cliff Bleszinski to the folks behind Capcom's MT Framework (which seems a bit odd since if it weren't for the MT Framework, Capcom would probably be using Sweeney's Unreal Engine).

For the record, Sweeney didn't fly to Japan just to deliver a signed Cliffy B Gears calendar to the MT Framework people. He's actually giving a lecture tomorrow as part of CEDEC's programming tract.

Here are the full results of the awards. As previously reported on the main channel, for everything except the Special Award, nominations were made by the general public and then narrowed down by a special CESA advisory panel (a list of panel members can be seen [a href=http://cedec.cesa.or.jp/contents/cedecadviser.html]at the CEDEC official site[/a]). The final voting was handled by CEDEC members and the advisory panel.

Everyone gave short speeches, some samples of which I'll have on the main channel shortly. But because I'm sure you're wondering, here's what Ueda said about his next project: absolutely nothing. He simply asked players to look forward to it, although he noted that it's still a ways off.